(De)humanizing Migrant Narratives:
The Production of Bad Migrants in Small Boat by Vincent Delecroix
Unit Number: ENGL39024
Name of Degree: English and Classical Studies
Name of Supervisor: Dr. Doseline Kirguru
Total Word Count: 6102
Contents
Abstract …………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….. 5
Acknowledgements ………………………………………………………………………………………………….. 6
Introduction ………………………………………………………………………………………………………………… 7
Chapter 1: The Abnormalities of Dehumanization ………………………………………………………….. 9
Section I: Forgoing the Quotation Marks …………………………………………………………………………. 13
Chapter 2: Borders, ‘Others,’ & Metaphors ………………………………………………………………………. 17
Section I: How Language Forms Borders ………………………………………………………………………… 19
Section II: Bodies Outside Territorial Boundaries ……………………………………………………………… 22
Conclusion: Looking at the Forgotten ……………………………………………………………………………… 25
Bibliography ………………………………………………………………………………………………………………… 27
Small Boat written by Vincent Delecroix examines the human rights violation of twenty-seven migrants who capsized in French territorial waters. As public outcry increased cause for investigation, the record of events outlining the night of November 24, 2021, posit crucial deficiencies amongst national authorities, responsibilities within the channel, and overall negligence as a ‘buck-passing’ mentality coursed through maritime systems. The act of migration posited as a territorial boundary and social contention, surround the fictionalized text to present methods of dehumanization by national caveats of space, the economy, and subjectivity. This paper will examine the repetitive practice of dehumanization toward migrants as a political system utilized to protect the native subject. Chapter 1 will focus on the French narrator’s response to the incident by analysing her apathetic attitude toward moral responsibility and her internal monologue that separates her role as a native subject and the migrant’s position as inferior ‘others’. Critical theorist will continue my argument with key writers such as Homi Bhabha, Achille Mbembe, and Hannah Ardent to explicate the development of a nation, the subjectivity of the bare life, and the role that duty and orders play into ‘evil’ and dehumanizing acts. Chapter 2 will explore the external role of territorial boundaries within the nation-space to argue the racialized construction of land to the metaphoric assembly of the ‘other.’
This thesis could not have been written without the support of the women around me, whose strength has been felt with each challenge endured over the last four years. More importantly, this paper goes out to all the young girls and women who have not been able to receive an education. Your voice, heart, and mind are valid, present, and will always be heard.
The political climate of migrant affairs has become increasingly fraught as reports of capsized boats dominate headlines, media outlets present immigration as an ‘epidemic,’ and intensifying racial tensions surpass national borders. Western nations have posited developing countries as foreign bodies capable of threatening national security, leading to harsher border checks and further restrictions toward ethnic groups. As a result, contemporary politics has left immigration at an impasse: policies deny the rights to migrate and political ideologies like the ‘right to man’ and sovereignty are threatened. The Journal of Immigrant & Refugee Studies published a piece by T. Waddell that investigates the effect of documentaries and fictional narratives on global perception toward refugees and asylum seekers. Waddell’s examination of fictionalized forms of media, presented a growing concern toward the minimization of the violence experienced in their home country:
[…] it has become increasingly common in many countries for citizens to conflate immigration and refugee relocation with little emphasis on the conditions that drive refugees to flee their homes or the systems that fail to support their needs in times of crisis1.
A migrant’s background surrounding crisis and national concerns will therefore not be investigated due to such persistent enforcements of dehumanization practices. Moreso, if we are to engage with the migrant’s dehumanized condition we must confront the very limits of sovereignty — a political space in which they are present, yet do not fully exist. They become victims of the state — renamed, undocumented, and characterized to boxes one must tick for ethnicity and spoken languages.
Turning to Small Boat, the conditions that have compelled one to cross international borders are intentionally ambiguous. As language is exchanged between the GPS operating system to echo in unmarked territories of the Atlantic Ocean, cultural identification will begin the process of shaping migrants as belonging outside the realm of national recognition. They are subjected to the authority of the narrator, and the sympathies of the chief police investigator, to interpret the presentation of English by the migrants as an inferior accent or a recognizable tone of dialect from passing ships. The native subject not only permits authority by their interpretation, but also a possession of the narrative by embodying a singular voice. Should an ‘s’ be attached onto the noun, Subject, the utilization of ‘subjects’ procures a different social attitude; they are ‘narrated’ as prescribed in Lyotard’s postmodernist approach, to posit the native Subject as having possession of the record and ‘[…] [as] the one doing the speaking, speaks from the place of the referent2.’ The political rationality of a homogenous, cultural representation becomes uncontested. The national allegory of ‘the people’ is solidified once more, if a representation of the Other, the non-native, or the immigrant is created; a rather roundabout way to a post-modern nationalism, should the society, […] seek to represent itself in the image of Enlightenment,” whose assertion, […] as a universal ideal, needs an Other3.”
Homi Bhabha’s reflection of the nation-state incites crucial rhetoric for the structure of ‘othering’ amidst nationhood: “The problematic boundaries of modernity are enacted in these ambivalent temporalities of the nation-space4.” Fictional narratives are captured within the sphere of modernity as tools for political gain and nationalistic agendas. To further my argument, an exploration to normalization of exclusionary and derogatory practices of the ‘bad’ migrant will be examined in Chapter 1.
Intentionally centring a singular, national voice within the text, Delecroix utilizes reports, investigations, media, and personal interest to create a stream-of-consciousness narrative of a maritime operator stationed at the incident that night. Suspending judgement on migrant affairs and remaining ambiguous on political bias, Delecroix constructs an internal monologue of a narrator lacking the common identifiers of a name or exposition. She becomes the unitary voice of the French collective, marked by a rigid interpretation of her role as a radio operator, while relying on her apathetic attitude to lessen the intense backlash of the female investigator. The aim of this chapter is to examine the methodology of dehumanization present in migrant narratives by applying a theoretical sequence of Achille Mbembe, Necropolitics, to Hannah Ardent, ‘banality of evil,’ as a poli-social body capable of interpreting the normalization of dehumanized abnormal treatment toward migrants.
The assured human right of sovereignty becomes controversial as border issues, active wars, and racial tension, challenge the “supreme, absolute, and uncontrollable power5,” a state governs itself upon. Terms to represent such processes of alienation, now surround the migrant to signify a lack of possession within their sovereignty, regarding ‘statelessness6’ or ‘displaced persons’ as representational labels of the ultra-politicized state of exception. The ‘exception’ permeates the right to soil, a fair trial, or access to foreign territories by the conditioned, persistent routine of dehumanization. The migrant must become a statistic; their displacement or cause for interception, delineates to a common narrative of being gathered, held in detention, prosecuted, or fatally injured. Achille Mbembe’s Necropolitics, suggests how the fatal acts become permitted, socially acceptable, and even righteous in the nationalistic context, by contextualizing Giorgio Agamben’s creation of ‘bare life’ and the exploration of Hannah Ardent’s, subjectivity under totalitarianism. Mbembe’s political theory on the systemic production of death investigates, “[…] under what practical conditions is the power to kill, to let live, or to expose to death exercised7?” The dualistic interpretation of ‘let live’ and expose death adorns a metaphorical boundary onto the native subject, allowing them to be recognized as to a ‘fully moral agent’ capable of exercising reason while also actively sustaining individual autonomy.
From Mbembe’s Necropolitics to Delecroix’s Small Boat, the narrator must become both the referent and the body of reason. Her subjectivity seeps into the narrative, as a model of the French polis and an individual with authority capable of narrating migrant affairs. Her sovereignty remains uncontested, reinforced by her role as a mother, her civic duty as a naval operator, and a rootedness to her apartment in Cap Griz-Nez, France. Therefore, her access to power is maintained outside of government institutions through her persistent performance of identity as a French native. This contemporary form of power emerges through her decisive idleness amidst the incident, leading her command of the narrative to ultimately control a mode of power Mbembe argues to operate through, “exception, emergency and a fictionalized notion of the enemy8.”
Taking Mbembe’s ‘fictionalized notion of the enemy’ and applying it to Hannah Arendt interrogation into moral and civic responsibility, the 1961 reports of the Eichmann Trials support a mode of exception created and sustained by the narrator. Her unusual phrase ‘banality of evil,’ began to emerge from her work, to explicate the actions of a Nazi party leader, Adolf Eichmann, who planned to finalize the Holocaust by a global, genocidal annihilation of Jews. Arendt’s psychoanalysis of Eichmann argued against the commonplace representation of evil to suggest that the obedience to order and systemic conformity are qualities found within ordinary individuals. As Adolf Eichmann recalls the duties of a man squandered by a Führer’s orders, the command of institutional violence and hateful speech pave way to a subordinate, mechanical obedience the once oil salesman turned SS Officer led with. Arendt latches onto these compositions of ‘duty’ and ‘order’ to begin her conception of the ‘banal’ attitude as:
In addition to performing what he conceived to be the duties of a law-abiding citizen, he has also acted upon orders – always so careful to be ‘covered’ — he became completely muddled, and ended by stressing alternately the virtues and the vices of blind obedience, or the ‘obedience of corpses9
More so, if the banal actions permit a blind obedience to authority seen in Eichmann’s deposition as ‘a bland, career-oriented bureaucrat,’ then the argument can be made that the monotonous, tedious tasks the radio operator enacted repeatedly, are susceptible to systematic persuasion until she too is obedient to a system that makes her, “[…] the legislator of the laws. […] the conviction that nothing less than going beyond the call of duty will do10.” Moreover, the narrator herself speaks to the blind obedience she performed, by analogizes her humanity to a machine, built by the superiors at CROSS:
[…] doesn’t erase the human aspect but mechanically produces inhumanity, manufactures, always on a small scale but with a global distribution, something inhuman within humanity, so I too become a kind of machine, or something between a machine and a human.11
Moreso, the text of Small Boat relies on a lack of concern toward the death of twenty-seven migrants, as means to abscond legal scrutiny and pose moral irresponsibility. Such immoral acts are performed by the narrator through a banal attitude, rife with ordinary responsibilities, a bland exposition, and a label of a single, struggling mother. She had all the sought-after qualities to obey authority. Her fulfilment of obedience to commands and institutional authority argue the movement of ‘evil’ and harmful actions begin at society by and large. For, if the ordinary status of an individual persuaded to withdraw assistance at the nation’s disposal by sheer preference toward race and circumstance, then the objectifiable, animalistic, exclusionary qualities in line with dehumanization tactics elucidate a broader picture of hierarchal persuasion. Likewise, the narrator’s argument projects the conveyance of power, by asserting no fault in abandonment of the migrant’s orange dingy, claiming:
(And also, could it not be said that when I asked for instructions, when the duty officer was informed, when the information was circulated in the station, they told me: Take your time on that one, let them stew in it for a bit; it will teach them a lesson)12
The recognition of one’s responsibility falls short on the individual level. The duty officer, the station, the colleague she laughs with on the recording, surpass her role as an ordinary radio operator. As she later argues, the fault does not lie within the misstep of her ignorance, but rather a broader, systemic authority excused from obedience. Afterall, in the most digestible sense, we are speaking upon conformity, “to the ruling political order simply because it is the ruling order8”
In conversation with Maija Kappler, the Canadian publicist speaks to the lack of quotation marks within up-and-coming contemporary authors, pointing to presentation of jagged text or the removal of ‘formal obstructions.’ Yet, this growing, stylistic convention develops inquiry into an interpretation of speech, and more so emotion, as the publicist writes”
Here both author and projected character as speaking, at once part of the on-going exposition deployed by the narrator and a representation of some else’s speech or thought. The style has been aptly described as ‘double-voiced’ where it becomes ambiguous which elements are ‘quotation,’ which the authorial voice: they are interlaced10
Delecroix’s utilization of Arendt’s ‘banality of evil’ is portrayed in the removal of quotation marks within the work of Small Boat, to interlace the apathetic French narrator and the sympathetic chief investigator as conceivably “[…] the same with ‘coat hanger’ shoulders13”; the stream of consciousness is leverage to confuse, intertwine, and create one bilateral voice of the French individual. More so, grasping the relationship of the ‘author and projected character’ within this narrative, exhibits the present politicized language and articulation of a nation ingested by Delecroix himself. As mentioned previously, the operator becomes a point of reference for the French nation as a unitary voice of culture, language, and belief, that allows her, as the narrator, to ‘double-voice’ the text: she speaks as a mother, a French citizen, and a radio operator in the Navy, while simultaneously embodying a symbolic French conviction toward migrants.
Amidst the presence of the narrators ‘double-voice,’ is the growing authority she comes to possess within the structure of the ‘Intelligentsia,’ that portrays her within a, “[…] social group whose special task it is to provide an interpretation of the world for that society14.” The authorial voice that constructs the representational belief of the nation is upheld by the power the narrator obtains in her government role. More specifically, the interpretation of the fatal incident must be processed, analysed or forgotten by the narrator before she is investigated. Therefore, with the utilization of her internal monologue, we can recognize her exercise of authority already, as she eliminates chunks of text regarding the event as signalled by the repetitive use of brackets.
Moreover, Mikhail Bakhtin’s literary theory of, ‘The Carnivalesque,’ furthers the Intelligentsia by elaborating to, “[…] a form of ritualistic spectacle which allows for traditional ideas and power structures to be suspended15”; as the referential voice and with significant space to argue her oversight, the narrator can reimagine a narrative fit to personally alleviate responsibility by utilizing the suspending power structures in place between the private chief police investigator and her stationed role in the Navy. The speaker of the ‘carnivalesque’ can alter their speech to allow characteristics of abuse to be, “[…] grammatically and semantically isolated from context and regarded as a complete unit, something like a proverb16.” For example, if judgement were passed from the police investigator during the interrogation the narrator is quick to abscond, to claim that the responsibility of her position was not to question, as her, “[…] judgement has no holes in, no fissures, but it does have boundaries, which correspond exactly to the boundaries of territorial waters11.” These boundaries are scapegoats for her moral insensitivity, that must be taken as absolute, by her following remark of, ”It’s that simple12,” to project her apathy as an aphorism, rather than a mistake. Therefore, if her action lacks the consequence of blame, or if a representative of the law, such as the investigator, is unable to impugn on the impact of her inaction during the incident, then the dehumanization of migrants can be applied without the consequence of formal, legal interventions. If it is not a mistake, but a boundary, and if her judgement is capable and not one to fissure, then the death of the twenty-seven migrants was a choice she made.
Halfway through the interrogation, the narrator and police investigator arrive at a standstill over the nihilistic display of emotion toward the accused situation. The exchange cast blame on an individual mix-up while the opposing side argues a systemic issue backlogged by the shortage of resources. Eventually, the stream of dialogue stops at, “[…] In short, that I was deliberately choosing to present a thoroughly terrifying image of myself. Those were her words. What Image? I asked, as a genuine question. A monster, she said. I smiled17.” The aversion toward quotation marks forces the dialogue and rapid conversation to simmer in the fluid, transparent speech of the narrator’s inner monologue. By association, the eluding quotation marks deliver a unified front that is uninterrupted by grammatical style. As the reader ingest the informality of the speech regarding the narrators’ personal beliefs on migrant affairs, or a lack thereof toward a political affiliation, the intimate internal and external dialogism provides an allowance for dehumanizing language, labels, or actions to appear as a uniform ideal of the person and nation she represents.
Moreover, Delecroix latches onto the use of ‘distinction,’ wrapping the adjective around the length of the text, to advise of clear symbolic and even nationalistic opinions regarding the capsized dingy. To enumerate briefly, the context of ‘distinct’ as an adjective shapes the narrators lack of name, the monologues filled with moral arguments on apathy verses sympathy, and the disruption of conventional punctuation marks to bridge the gap of personal affect to a national representation of migrant affairs. However, the distinction made between the number of bodies drowned, twenty-seven, and the number of operators on call that night, two, give rise to a recognizable shift in dehumanizing practices – numbering. The tone of conversation lulls, the voices of either woman are unrecognizable as they claim status over the number of ships, stations, radio calls on the system that night; it is no longer the recognition of the bodies, but an inability to identify fault. Either way, the screams of the migrants run on, like that stream of consciousness Delecroix achieved within his prose, to yell ‘help’ down the line repeatedly, until the narrator must argue, “Not all their words are equal.18” By the end of the run-on sentences and the mirrored tone of both women, the narrator’s final distinction can only develop into which body is equal to hers.
Lastly, a phenomenon Arendt captures as ’all men have become equally superfluous’, argues that ordinary men have been deemed unnecessary to the system, either by government institutions or hierarchal structures. A declaration made in the final pages of her text, The Origins of Totalitarianism, asserts, “This [the superfluous] happens as soon as all unpredictability – which, in human beings, is the equivalent of spontaneity – is eliminated.19” The apathetic arguments by the narrator throughout the investigation supports such ‘superfluous’ arguments, as she states that the fault and eventual blame of the migrants, relies on their ’spontaneous’ decision to leave the coast of France that night in November. They become subjects, ‘the parasites’, and the ‘naked bodies wrapped up in gold thermal blankets,’ and by diction alone, the migrants become unnecessary through her bias and racialized ideologies, which unconsciously isolated and fatally ’eliminated’ them from integrating into society. After all her claims, “I was not required to have an opinion on the migrants20” only solidify how dehumanization practices and language shaped her a dialogic, apathic relationship toward the non-native.
Maritime boundaries are invisible, fluid, and geographically dependent on international jurisdiction of the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS). An orange dingy departing from a piece of French land, with twenty-nine migrants aboard, must navigate the English Channel in the middle of the night, with no autonomous GPS system or access to remote operational centres. Rather the mixed group will have communicated by a glowing telephone unable to reach service towers while focusing on the precise positioning of their bodies to not sink upon boarding. In the end, the migrants never did make it to British waters. They remained unaware of whose territory they capsized amongst as their neon vests pulsed to life, or which nation-state would claim the shifting waves as their own, personal interest. Neither French nor British officials would overtly claim ownership of the migrants, only the catastrophe, leaving their ambivalent responses worthy of examination toward an ‘otherness’ present in nationhood and territorial boundaries. After establishing the theoretical structures that surround dehumanization tactics by targeting sovereignty and systemic execution of migrant, this chapter aims to cover the metaphorical relationship between borders and ‘otherness’, by analysing linguistic racism and territorial boundaries.
To conceptualize territorial boundaries, the premise and legitimization of the nation proceed as the primary concern. Homi Bhabha’s, Nation & Narration, confronts the social and political functions that formulate our identities of ‘the people’ or ‘the nation,’ as markers for cultural identification. It is by linking “a people, a nation, or a national culture21” that the narrative, literary, and fictionalized persona of the group identity begins to systemically evolve as a unified character. As the nation settles, the cultural identity begins to categorize the boundary of the ‘other,’ the stranger, or even the enemy. The logic is induced by nationalistic agendas, of superiority through biological difference or an enhanced wealth divide that suits a narrative of those enlightened, ’the national subject’, or those who are ignorant and seen as, “the minority, the exilic, the marginal, and the emergent22,’ are disparate. Yet, acts of dissimilarity must be sustained as, “[…] the people constructed in the performance of narrative, its emancipatory ‘present’ mark the repetition and pulsation of the national sign23.” The performance and repetitive conditions of the nation-state to Delecroix’s Small Boat present a mode of boundaries persist in two categories: a social exclusion of the migrant through racialized language and denied access to a territory due to one’s immigration status. The production of the national narrative finds root in the dichotomy of the native, subject, and the migrant, other, at the recognition of sovereignty and domestic identity. Subsequent interactions would then posit language, visible ethnicity, or articulated accents as characteristics that oppose the narrator’s affiliation to her mother country. While racial slurs are not used as a layer to differentiate, the imposed boundary of animalistic metaphors, victim-blaming, and ostracization encompasses the narrator’s interaction with the migrants as a mode of racial targeting.
Racialized language has become a mechanism through which migration is codified. The non-dominant speaker is spatially excluded, as their mother-tongue or foreign accent does not satisfy the common, public monolinguism of the nation-space. This representationalist discourse depends on social construction, on nationalist rhetoric, to feed into the majority and “[…] on reflection it is clear that language is often a political fact, at least as much as it is a cultural one. […] And what official or recognized languages are in any given instance is often the result of politics and power interplays24.” Crucially, the language does not have to be explicitly racist. Dehumanization is assembled outside the normative, with a personal objective to assume superiority over the non-native. For instance, the narrator of Small Boat, executes the degradation comfortably, arguing, “In other words, I kind of lost sight of what a human life is, with these shedloads of migrants getting dumped in the sea every day25.” The use of ‘shedloads’ persecutes the autonomous existence of the migrant, dead in the Atlantic Ocean. The subjectivity of the migrants are aggregated, processed as a singular, routine voice infesting the narrators’ territorial waters; they were needy ‘parasites’ who, “[..] try to lure you in; their voices are like siren songs; you have to resist and block your ears while you listen26.” They become inhuman, subordinate, re-entering the waters ‘everyday,’ to instigate the French radio operator by calling repetitively, screaming for help down the line. The more the migrants got ’dumped’ into French waters, the more the narrators emotionless, repetitive replies made “the line go dead27.”
Authority is muddled by Delecroix’s application of ambiguity, as the narrator’s defence come to lie within the words she muttered over the radio, rather than the fatal action itself. In the midst of the civil investigation, she claims no fault in the death of twenty-seven migrants, arguing, “They are dead because they put themselves in mortal danger, and they put themselves in mortal danger because instead of sitting in their room, they left, and it wasn’t me who asked them to leave28.” The ‘subjects’, designated to the pronoun of ‘they,’ are intently outcasted by the necessity of the narrator to retain her sovereignty. If she was to declare similarities of subjectivity, identity, or nationhood, she could not prove authority in this incident. Therefore, her denial is crucial to abscond any personal shame of the migrant death, while also implicitly declaring her security as a French native, in French territory, to be held with less accountability than a foreigner. The lack of conception toward foreign integration within the century’s old community of the nation-space, pacifies any wrongdoing of the narrator as she relies on exclusionary practices of racism or ‘Othering’ to demean the non-natives action altogether.
Moreover, the derogatory actions performed by the narrator are argued to have been performed by a wider audience, framed as a national initiative of the French denying moral responsibility toward migration and small boats. This mechanical system outlined by Arendt becomes fraught with silence, obedience, and order from the French government; that unitary, representational voice of the narrator can only argue:
They wanted me to have said it, at least to have said it, just to have said the words. That was what the investigator was waiting for anxiously, for everyone to hear, to hear their own voice in mine in these recordings. The voice of each of us saying I will save you. Each one in my place.29
The authorial intention to pursue the narrative as a singular, cohesive commentary, rips at the protective armour the narrator in this instance desperately tries to grasp. Her inner monologue becomes attuned to morally abate the death of the migrants by attacking the other French, native subjects for their lack of response during the incident. As her denial shifts to blame, the necessity to forgo fault persist in the overwhelming power the native subject can exercise in French territory, as possession of the narrative allows her to, “exert control over morality.30”
The degradation of migrants within maritime travel, begins at a cultural normative of dehumanizing, oppressive language weaponized to assert superiority of culture and status. The narrator’s ex-husband introduces a clear motivation and racialized conviction of the migrants arriving in the United Kingdom via French waters, claiming that as soon as navy operators: “[…] spotted one, we didn’t chuck them [migrants] straight in the water, with a good thwack of an oar if possible, to make sure they didn’t rise back up to the surface,31” then they weren’t doing their job well enough. The narrator upholds a similar sentiment, stating her objective as an operator is, “to come to the aide of these parasites32.” The normalcy of their degrading comments is indulgent to individual beliefs, yet they encompass a broader, institutional attitude; the arrival of migrants on small boats in the Atlantic Ocean not only warrants aggression, but the demonization spurred by insults and alienation. More so, the migrant will remain inequal to the French native, trapped by the removal of subjectivity as ‘they’ encapsulates cultures, languages, nations, and identity and until ‘they’ become, “[…] nothing. They are no one, no one in particular, [just] naked bodies that must be wrapped up in gold thermal blankets33.”
The native subject and their dominant presence within the nation-space is automatically signified ‘a priori.’ Conversely, the formation of the ‘othered’ subjects depends on the historical stability of the nation-state and therefore a dependence toward the foreign territory they have entered; the bodies of the migrant will not signal a ‘brotherhood’ or a relation to the land, as they will be welcomed exclusively as enemies to the state. In conversation with Franz Fanon written in Necropolitics, Achille Mbembe utilizes the French philosopher’s description of boundaries, writing, “[…] it is regulated by the language of pure force, immediate presence, and frequent and direct action; and it is premised on the principle of reciprocal exclusivity34.” Such exclusivity is held in the hand of the narrator here, as investigative reports display her actions of hanging up the phone or refusal to answer routine calls as control over language.
Moreso, the crutch of ambiguity the narrator has leaned on to abscond moral responsibility is not applicable when the authority of her role as a radio operator is challenged. The territorial bounds of the naval office in Cap Gris-Nez, France establish the border ruled by the control of the narrator, extends from the English crew in Dover, United Kingdom to the French coast of Calais where the migrants departed. Therefore, it is even more important to emphasize her choice to not call for backup from the English Emergency Response Team when both national services were available. The narrator internally confesses to a mistake made the night of the incident, claiming:
Rather the one which may or may not have been an outright lie – I couldn’t quite remember – when I told the English that it wasn’t possible to send our patrol boat because it was busy on another Misson. This didn’t feature clearly in either the written report of the night’s operations or in my own memory.35
The narrator’s presentation of confusion is problematic. At first glance, the internal monologue reads as unsympathetic, or even unreliable by a misstep in her memory, yet if Ardent’s theoretical interpretation of evil is affixed to the narrators account, her failure to send out the patrol boats was systematic. It became as effortless to deny sovereignty of the migrant as much as it became normalized to deny them access to aid via the patrol boats or organizations controlling the border, like CROSS. Her ‘misplaced’ memory is punishing, fatal, and degrading until, “the state made the management, protection, and cultivation of life coextensive with the sovereign right to kill.36”
Lastly, Delecroix unknowingly meshes the metaphorical landscape of government institutions within paperwork and office furniture to the site of the migrants’ bodies hovering in the swell of the Atlantic Ocean, by utilizing that internal monologue of the narrator to produce a symbolism of referential borders pouring into every-day life. In the midst of dissociating, the narrator exclaims:
So now they were floating on the investigator’s desk, at the Coast Guard’s office. There were twenty-seven of them to be exact, including a little girl, scattered among the ballpoint pens, the note blocks, folders, floating round the police inspector’s computer, including also the body of the man who had called me fourteen times that night and who now, obviously, had fallen silent. The sea was calm on the surface of the desk, no wind, no swell, and alongside the bodies only orderly piles of paper37
A derivative of her moral apathy, the bodies of the migrants were never the problem for her within the incident, it was that the bodies dared to enter French territory at all. The narrator leans into spatial dehumanization to appear morally neutral, as if to show she is upholding her duties as a French native by protecting the national security, yet the bodies of the dead migrants surpass the borders of ocean, the persistent banging of the construction workers outside the window, and pass the tension of the interview to internally deliberate on her daughters wellbeing. Moreso, the calm, orderly function of the desk marked by barriers of pens and paperwork contain the infestation of their fluid shapes and movement. “They were floating,” is not a mere statement, but a re-enactment of the death the narrator consciously induced; the production of calm seas and the still shapes of the bodies carries this new metaphorical death into the marked territory of French land, where they would still be killed, once more.
He felt a hand trying to hold him back. He thought,
When I get to England I will work in a grocery store.
A grocery store, he repeated to himself.
Part II, Small Boat (p. 92)
The names of the migrants who fatally drowned during the night of November 2021, were never disclosed.38 The motivations for each one of their journey’s were spatially astray, drowning out identities, language, families and childhood until they were constrained to a few “[…] Kurds, a few Africans […] two women and a little girl.39” Eventually, an erasure of the incident was created by French officials and subsequent maritime infrastructures, as they refused to respond to United Kingdom official reports or provide crucial evidence of oversights made that night.
Presently, contemporary media has continued to broadcast the number of migrants who cross the English channel as animals, savages, ferocious enough to break down the borders of colonial waters. Such words will finds themselves as summaries invoking racialized scrutiny through miscellaneous data points and outdated numbers, to strike fear into the reader and a complex toward capitalistic systems to defend tax payer dollars. The erasure will continue nationalistic tirades, while also working to remove the migrants entirely at the end of the article, book, newspaper, or comedy jab.
In this paper, I have argued that the normalization of dehumanization practices has impacted migrant narratives and actions to be seen as ‘bad’, ‘immoral’ and irresponsible. More so, the abnormal treatment of the migrants has become perfunctory within media headlines, fictionalized narratives, and political agendas to create boundaries from the individual level to global borders. Yet, it is important to note, that my investigations into the normative dehumanization practices will not erase nor solve the persecution of migrants, if the boundaries established from the individual belief to a global assumption are not rectified or demolished.
Agamben, Giorgio, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, Standford University Press, 1998.
Ardent, Hannah, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, Penguin Classics, 2006, p. 135.
Bhabha, Homi, ‘DissemiNation: Time, Narrative, and the Margins of the Modern Nations,’ in Nation & Narration (Routledge, 2013), pp. 291-322.
Bhaktin, Mikhail, Rabelais and His World, Indiana University Press, 1984.
Delecroix, Vincent, Small Boat. Hope Road Publishing, 2023.
Gilroy, Paul, There Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack, Hutchinsons Education, 1987, pp 43-71.
May, Stephen, ‘Linguistic Racism: Origins and Implications,’ Sage Journals, 23(5), pp. 651-661. <https://doi.org/10.1177/1468796823119307>.
Mbembe, Achille, ‘Necropolitics,’ in Necropolitics, Duke University Press, 2019, pp. 66-92, < https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv1131298.7>.
Merriam-Webster, ‘Sovereignty,’ Merriam-Webster Dictionary, 2026. <https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/sovereignty>.
Raine, Sophie, ‘What is Bakhtin’s Carnivalesque?’ Perlego, 2023, < https://www.perlego.com/knowledge/study-guides/what-is-carnivalesque>.
Richard Bernstein, ‘Reflections on Radical Evil: Arendt and Kant,’ Soundings: An Interdisciplinary Journal, 85(1/2), 2002, pp. 17.30, <https://www.jstor.org/stable/41179024>.
Waddell and others, ‘The Effect of Documentary and Fictional Narratives on Dehumanization of Refugees and Stereotype Reversal,’ Journal of Immigrant & Refugee Studies, 22(3), pp. 531- 544. < https://doi.org/10.1080/15562948.2022.2061096>.
Bhaktin, Mikhail, Rabelais and His World, Indiana University Press, 1984.
[1] Waddell and others, ‘The Effect of Documentary and Fictional Narratives on Dehumanization of Refugees and Stereotype Reversal,’ Journal of Immigrant & Refugee Studies, 22(3), pp. 531- 544.
[2] Homi Bhaba. Nation and Narration, Routledge, 1990, p. 301.
[3] Bhabha 1990: 293.
[4] Bhabha 1990: 294.
[5] Merriam-Webster, ‘Sovereignty,’ Merriam-Webster Dictionary, 2026.
[6] For further information on the application of the terms ‘statelessness’ and ‘displaced persons’ please see Hannah Ardent, ‘Decline of the nation-state; End of the rights of man,’ The Origins of Totalitarianism, A harvest Book, 1966. “Nonrecognition of statelessness always means repatriation, i.e, deportation to a country of origin, which either refuses to recognize the prospective repatriate as a citizen, or, on the contrary, urgently wants him back for punishment.” (Ardent 1966: 279).
[7] Mbembe, Achille, ‘Necropolitics,’ in Necropolitics, Duke University Press, 2019, p. 66.
[8] Mbembe 2019: 70.
[9] Hannah Ardent, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, Penguin Classics, 2006, p. 135.
[10] Ardent 2006: 137.
[11] Delecroix 2023: 72.
[12] Delecroix 2023: 71-72.
[13] Delecroix 2023: 11.
[14] Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, Indiana University Press, 1984.
[15] Sophie Raine, ‘What is Bakhtin’s Carnivalesque?’ Perlego, 2023.
[16] Bakhtin 1984: 207.
[17] Delecroix 2023: 53.
[18] Delecroix 2023: 44.
[19] Richard Bernstein, ‘Reflections on Radical Evil: Arendt and Kant,’ Soundings: An Interdisciplinary Journal, 85(1/2), 2002, pp. 19.
[20] Delecroix 2023: 27.
[21] Bhabha 2013: 292.
[22] Bhabha 2013: 300.
[23] Bhabha 2013: 299.
[24] Stephen May, ‘Linguistic Racism: Origins and Implications,’ Sage Journals, 23(5), pp. 652.
[25] Delecroix 2023: 104.
[26] Delecroix 2023: 50.
[27] Delecroix 2023: 84.
[28] Delecroix 2023: 59.
[29] Delecroix 2023: 121.
[30] Mbembe 2019: 66.
[31] Vincent Delecroix, Small Boat. Hope Road Publishing, 2023, p. 28.
[32] Delecroix 2023: 27.
[33] Delecroix 2023: 49.
[34] Mbembe 2013: 79.
[35] Delecroix 2023: 59.
[36] Mbembe 2019: 71.
[37] Delecroix 2023: 20-21.
[38] For further information, please see MAIB, ’Report on the Investigation into the flooding and partial sinking of an inflatable migrant boat resulting in the loss of at least 27 lives in the Dover Strait,’ The United Kingdom Merchant Shipping, No.7, 2023. ”Despite extensive request the MAIB has not been permitted to examine the migrant boat that was involved in this accident, nor have any details of the flotation devices, equipment carried, survivors or the deceased been forthcoming from French authorities.”
[39] Delecroix 2023: 77.
Amanda Rae 